


Thirteen

by itsjustsilver



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Voldemort Wins, Blood and Violence, Captivity, Cruelty, Dark, F/M, Fem! Harry Potter - Freeform, Female Harry, Female Harry Potter, Forgiveness, Harry Potter is a Horcrux, Horcruxes, Legilimency, Non-Sexual Sadism, Psychological Torture, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Revenge, Sadism, Short Story, Soul Bond, Suicidal Thoughts, Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2020-06-28 02:43:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19803076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itsjustsilver/pseuds/itsjustsilver
Summary: The Dark Lord has discovered something very important about Hera Potter, but he is not so forgiving, and old scores must be settled.Dark story. Female Harry Potter x Voldemort/Tom RiddleStory begins towards the end of sixth year.





	1. Capture

**Author's Note:**

> Guess who got bored of their other stories?
> 
> This is my darkest Tom Riddle yet, but there will be a light at the end of the tunnel.

Hera awakes.

She’s not where she should be. She’s not in her dorm, at Hogwarts, where the light streams through the high windows appearing to set fire to the red and gold tapestries and bed drapes, and the cold drafts swirl in to make the flames in the fireplaces dance. She’s on cold stone, in a cold room; there are no windows, and the air is stale.

The door is locked, and Hera does not have her wand. She’s never been proficient at wandless magic, but she tries anyway. Maybe that’s what draws his mind there, because he comes at once.

He comes, holding yew wand, and there is a strange anger in his face.

Hera launches herself at him, fighting the muggle way, and she doesn’t mind; she’s spent much of her life playing muggle anyway. But so has he, and he wins as if he hasn’t already won.

“Hera Potter,” he spits, when she’s huddled by his feet and can barely hear for the ringing in her ears. “I’ve waited for this day for many years…” He’s circling her; his feet are bare. “And yet once again, I am thwarted, it seems.”

He stops and Hera wonders who or what has come this time to save her again.

Thwarted. He’s always thwarted, even when he’s had her defenceless in a crib or alone in the forgotten nest of a basilisk, or bound against a gravestone, and thwarted it seems he is again, by his own admission. Maybe she’s not destined to ever be killed by him.

He laughs, and the sound rises high. “You don’t know how much truth there is in that, my horcrux,” he says, and he articulates that statement so hatefully and so spitefully, that Hera, as astonished as she is, doesn’t think to disbelieve him.

He sees the shocked understanding in her face. “So, you do know what that means,” he says. “How much, I wonder?”

Then he’s tearing into her mind, and Hera knows now that what Snape had put her through in her Occlumency lessons last year had been easy; mere child’s play, in fact. The blood that flows from her nose is viscous, and maybe she’s bleeding from the brain; it certainly feels like she is.

When he finds the memories of her private lessons with Dumbledore and sees the Gaunt ring on his withered hand, blinding rage flows from him like a river of lava. “So,” he huffs like a bull. “So. It wasn’t enough for you to have robbed me of my body. You plot also to destroy my soul.”

Hera runs the back of her hand through her bloodied face. “That’s how I plan to kill you, yeah.”

He shoots her a dirty look. “If you only had the grace to die the first time I wanted you to.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” Hera says, and attacks him again, rearing up to claw unceremoniously at his robes, but he says a word and suddenly Hera’s hands are burning even though there is no sign of fire. She staggers back flailing and mind casting deliriously about in that bare room for something with which to douse the searing pain.

The spell is lifted only when she is close to passing out. “I don’t think you understand your position. I have you now. No one is coming.”

“Good,” Hera pants with bravado. Her suffering is guaranteed and there’s nothing for it. “Your Death Eaters can’t help you then.” And she charges again.

This time he does let the pain carry her away. When she returns, he is standing almost halfway across the room. He slowly points his wand at her, arm extended fully. “I am your Lord now, and you must atone. Atone and you will be forgiven, for I am a merciful Lord.”

“No thanks,” says Hera when she’s strong enough to speak. “I don’t want your forgiveness.”

“You’ll want it. But first you must pay for what you did to me.”

Hera pushes herself to her knees, but that’s the furthest her body is willing to rise. “Didn’t do anything to you,” she mumbles. “Don’t want anything from you.”

He glides forward. “Thirteen years I suffered, when my spirit was ripped from its home. Thirteen long years. I will want thirteen years of your pain before I can forgive you.”

Alarm shines through Hera’s eyes, burning right through the fatigue. “What are you on about? You can’t mean to- you don’t mean that literally?”

His wand hand doesn’t move. It’s pointed directly at her chest. “Yes, I do. And your penance starts now. Are you ready?”

Hera looses one long, shaky exhale, closes her eyes in preparation, then springs to life in another desperate bid at self-defence. “No!!”

“Crucio.”


	2. Torture

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks everyone who expressed interest in this story and left feedback. x

“Crucio,” he snarls, and Hera’s back arches off the ground, her teeth bite involuntarily down on her tongue, and blood fills her mouth.

The pain is truly extraordinary. It’s so pure it effaces almost everything else. And it’s not localised. There’s just pain, pain, pain and more pain, until there isn’t. Sometimes she emerges from that white haze to find herself alone, and then it’s hours, or days, or weeks, or months until his return. She doesn’t know; there’s no natural light, and the house-elf that takes care of her basic needs won’t talk to her.

When the room comes back into focus, Hera’s jaw is as stiff and tender as if she’s been holding it wide open for hours, and she’s bruised as if she’s been fighting herself. She probably has been. The pain, she realises, makes one do crazy things. It will probably make her permanently crazy soon enough.

Does she want that? Maybe if she were crazy it would hurt less. At least there would be less of her to really feel the hurt. But no. No. The thought of losing her mind scares her even more than the pain. The thought of being without _being_. She thinks it’s why she’s better than most at resisting the Imperius. It’s strange, but she’s always been secure in her own brain. It isn’t so much a part of her that needs protecting as it is the part of her that does the protecting. Shielding. Screening. Safeguarding. Bulwarking?

It’s taking her awhile to organise her thoughts and to make sense of her own confused ruminations: She was being tortured, that’s evident. But why? What had she done to merit this last round of the curse of pain?

Ah, yes, she’d insinuated that he was bent. _Bent for Dumbledore,_ to be precise. Yes, that had been very funny.

Hera rolls over onto her back, massaging her jaw with spasming fingers.

He’s still there, hovering over her. He hasn’t left, which means he’s in quite a temper. Not surprising given the jab she’d made. He gives her a spiteful kick to the ribs. “Magical folk are so resilient,” he observes. “If you were one of those weak muggle creatures, this would probably kill you. But luckily for us both, I can do this again, and again, and again, and you’ll still stick around.” He kicks her once more to demonstrate his point.

“How many times more must Voldemort die before he stops sticking around?” Hera mock-asks, exhaling through her mouth. It helps control the tremors, and it’s even somewhat grounding, mentally speaking. Gives her something to focus on. “Seven. The answer is seven.”

That earns her what must be hours of bone-grinding pain. Hera screams, curses, cries, begs for forgiveness, begs for death- all the things he wants to hear, but she doesn’t mean any of them, not really. Well, she does, in the moment; in the tight, all-encompassing embrace of the pain, she could mean anything, but she always comes back to herself. She knows that and he knows that, and-

“Crucio!”

When Hera stills in a sticky mess of her own blood, looking at her torn fingernails, she’s doing math. Seven is not correct. The answer is actually six. Ah, well.

Hera thinks about getting up, decides against it. She’s not a masochist, and she’s had enough.

Rudimentary healing spells course through her body. He manages to make even those uncomfortable: it’s like being hosed down with cold water. And then he leaves.

-

When he returns, he’s in a foul mood. He’s always in a foul mood. Maybe the war goes poorly for him. She voices the suggestion and-

“Crucio!”

It’s not that she wants to be tortured. It’s that she knows she’s going to be, regardless, so… Might as well make it worth the pain.

“You’ll lose,” she tells him. Her spirits remain high because she knows she’ll be found. She _has_ to be found. “Dumbledore will defeat you. Dumbledore will come.”

“Even knowing that if Dumbledore comes for you it will be to kill you, you wish for my defeat?” He’s not actually asking, not actually curious- she can hear the flat abhorrence in his voice. Something about her readiness to be self-sacrificed is reprehensible to him, in a fundamental, impersonal way.

“Crucio,” he snarls, as if he can re-shape that clearly disturbing facet of Hera’s make-up through pain. 

Pain, pain, pain.

She’s twitching in weird places, places she wasn’t even aware she had muscles in. Places like the space between her arse and her hipbone or the area around her shoulder blades- for a moment she imagines she’s growing wings. But even if she does, where would she fly to? To the ceiling?

When she’s sufficiently recovered, she pulls herself up to a sitting position. Always to a sitting position; she refuses to kneel in his presence, not since that first time. There’s blood in her mouth; she’s bitten her tongue again. She spits and she smiles, and she knows her smile is bloody. “You died screaming like a little bitch, you know. When I stabbed your diary-self in its diary-stomach. With your own basilisk’s fang.” She makes a stabbing motion- the same motion she’d used when she’d asked him if he was bent, and the same one for when she’d told him to get bent.

She doesn’t know what he is especially enraged by: that at least one of his precious pieces of soul has been dispatched, that that gigantesque snake, the most awe-inspiring link to his great ancestor is no more, or the idea that he, Lord Voldemort, -even if it be just the inferior, seventeen-year old horcrux version- could be vanquished in such an undignified manner.

Hera suspects the latter. Whatever it is, it is apparently the last straw and he takes her voice from her. On top of that, he’s also vexed; Hera has not responded as desired, and on the contrary, is becoming more and more audacious.

But why not? After all, what worse hell can befall her?

His teeth are like arrowheads. “Don’t try me.”


	3. Alter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really like this.

Hera can suffer in silence. Hera can _only_ suffer in silence.

There’s a difference, she knows, between wanting to suffer in silence and having to suffer in silence. Although is it really silence if he can hear her, can understand her anyway?

When the tears and blood have dried on her face, and Hera is looking up at the hated point of his wand again, her muscles tensing instinctively under her skin in anticipation of more pain, she wonders what’s taking the Order so long. What’s taking Dumbledore so long?

“Dumbledore won’t come.” He smiles as if he has a secret he wants to share and is only waiting for the right time. “No one will come. No one cares about you.”

He’s wrong. _He’s wrong!_

“I’m almost never wrong,” he singsongs boastfully. “And on the rare occasion that I am, I correct my mistakes quickly. Like you. You’re a mistake.” He bends down and taps her cheek with one long, cold forefinger. “How are you enjoying the process of being corrected?”

Hera curses colourfully, creatively. She’s had a lot of time to think up some very good insults, and she flings them rapidly at him now. But he only smiles nastily and taps his own temple. “I only hear you when I want to, so I’m afraid whatever you’re trying to communicate now is wasted. I get the gist of it, however, so…” He cocks his head. “Crucio.”

-

He’s starving her.

Hera does not know when last the house-elf came with a meal or exactly how many she’s missed, but it’s many. Can she survive without food or drink? She is a witch, that’s true. She can survive much more than an ordinary muggle can. And obviously Hera’s no stranger to being starved; she can probably last longer than even most witches and wizards can. But a natural lifetime? Doubtful.

When it feels like her body is about to consume itself from the inside out, he arrives. “The house-elf tells me you’re ready.”

She stirs lethargically and doesn’t respond.

“Starvation is a better teacher than pain, hm?” he muses, noting her distinct lack of fire. She remains prone on the ground in a faint, too weak to even lift her head. He drags her up, talking some more; in a good mood for once, judging by the tone, although Hera cannot possibly follow his words; it’s difficult to concentrate. Doesn’t matter anyway. Everything he says is rubbish.

Rubbish… She’d eat rubbish right now, she would.

A vial is at her lips. Potion like liquid fire goes down her parched throat and she coughs and splutters while the fire spreads as energy through her head, chest, limbs, and finally to her extremities.

Suddenly, despite the lack of nourishment, she’s well.

She realises she’s in a house-elf’s bony arms, and he’s crouched on the ground in front of them, arms crossed, wand in one hand. He looks pleased. “Welcome to immortality,” he says. “Or, I should say rather, eternal youth.” He stands, uncrossing his arms.

 _What the hell?_ Hera brushes his house-elf’s stroking hands away and gets to her feet to face him.

“Not true immortality,” he elaborates. And his smile twitches; grows sharper and greedier. “That is reserved only for me.”

 _What the hell?_ Hera has many questions, but all thoughts freeze at the sight of something she’d failed to notice in her weakened state, something that now draws her full and horrified attention, and although she’s strong and hale and an arm’s length from him and should attack, she is rooted to the spot.

“Did you want to say something Hera?” he asks, as innocuous as a bear trap. His grip on his wand is light; his fingers are relaxed.

That’s Dumbledore’s wand. That’s Dumbledore’s wand, that’s Dumbledore’s wand, _that’s Dumbledore’s wand..._

“Why so it is,” he says pleasantly, before adopting an exaggerated air of mourning. “At least it _was_. I regret to inform you that Dumbledore is no more. _He_ wasn’t fortunate enough to be my horcrux.”

She goes for the wand, feral with grief, but he’s expecting it of course, and takes it as an invitation to send currents of pain flowing through her brain. “You make it so easy,” he laughs, as she writhes on the floor. “So predictable.”

He crouches down again, the better to taunt her with. “Dumbledore, cretin that he is, destroyed Flamel’s stone, so I’ve had to invent my own.” He holds up a pale flat stone. “This one doesn’t turn anything into gold; I’ve no use for that, but it does almost everything else. It’ll keep your body unchanged for me, which is all I want of it, really.”

“Now, listen.” He reaches to rub his thumb through the blood that’s beaded up out of scratches on Hera’s cheek, and laughs when she furiously swats at him. “I realise I’ve made another mistake. I’ve been dealing with you incorrectly. You’re not responding to my current methods, and that’s okay.”

He catches her wrist, holds it firm, and goes back to agitating her torn cheek. “That’s okay. It’s helped me think. You see, I’ve been wondering how best to convey to you just what it was like for me, those thirteen terrible years when I was alone and forgotten by the world.” And his face convulses momentarily, pained and ugly, as if the true form of his disfigured spirit is shining through his flesh.

But he smooths out his expression, and he dips one slightly trembling hand into his robes to pull out a little vial filled with a smoky liquid. “After months of experimentation, I believe I’ve finally replicated the very particular and very arduous experience I lived through. Do you know what it’s like to be a weak, torn, homeless spirit? It doesn’t feel anywhere near as good as the Cruciatus, you know. It’s- well, you’ll see. Imperio. Drink this.”

Hera goes to take the vial. Her hand spasms. Her fingernails knock against the glass.

“Still resisting?” he says, amused. “I admit, I like that about you. I liked it then, and I like it now.” He cocks his head, smiling. He seizes her jaw, forces it open, and Hera empties the vial in one unwilling gulp.

He shoves her violently back onto the ground when she’s done and turns to address the elf. “You’ll make her take one vial of each potion twice a month. No more food is required. No more drink.”

Hera is shivering mutely on the ground, eyes rolling upwards. He strokes her line of lightning with the tip of his newly-won wand. “If you’re good enough, if you’re _contrite_ enough, one day I’ll let you have some of Nagini’s venom. You’ll appreciate it. I did.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You like this too?


	4. Shatter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Who's still reading?

He’s roaring. Like a cornered, enraged animal, he’s roaring. The sound is thunderous, terrible, splitting the formless darkness which Hera now occupies in full.

Her spirit is a nebula.

Until his fingers close on her shoulder.

It’s the sensation of skin on skin that breaks the spell, that reminds her that she isn’t smoke and vapour; that she has a body, is a body.

“Where is it?” he roars at her. He’s holding up a gold locket on a long chain. He’s holding her up. “WHERE IS IT?”

They’re no longer in the dungeon; he’s moved her. They’re somewhere cool and dark. Underground, maybe, in a cave deep underground. Hera doesn’t recognise the place. There’s a stone basin by them, and she thinks they’re surrounded by water. She can hear its soft lapping, a gentle soundtrack to the echoes of his rumbling voice that go on and on around them.

Hera takes several minutes to respond; not out of defiance, it’s simply taking her that long to pull herself together; to feel. To be.

Then the defiance comes.

It’s the first thing that comes out of her mouth (she’s forgotten that she’s been silenced): some small-dick insult, a common one, not even a very good one. She sniggers in mute appreciation anyway.

He doesn’t care that she’s mocking him, he’s in such wild distress. His face is white, stark white, and his eyes are red flames in their sockets.

Impatient, he drives into her brain. She doesn’t know what he’s looking for because he doesn’t find it, but he’s exacting in his search and he lets her feel the knife-edge precision with which he flays her thoughts and memories.

Then, useless to him, she’s flung aside. Her shoulder strikes the stone basin. Her aching cry is trapped in her throat.

He’s on a little boat, rowing away on water like rippling glass. His robes fade into the shadows, him along with it, his form dissolving as he slips further and further away, until only the faint diminishing glow of his eyes remains to her, like the afterglow of a Stupefy. Red against black. She blinks, and that too is gone.

A minute, maybe two, and then Hera herself begins to dissolve.

How to explain it, this feeling, this hideous dream that’s no dream? This invisible horror?

For the moment that he had thrown her from himself, the potion had begun to work its evil in Hera’s brain and body: to make her forget the skin that clothes her.

Ripples of creeping sensation torment Hera; make her feel raw; open and sensitive. She’s a snail without a shell. She’s a spirit without a body. She is low, lower than the lowest of creatures. Lower than the worms and the roaches and the mites which at least have their bodies, their earthly houses.

Hera has no house, and she’s dissolving, dissolving…

-

There’s some activity going on around her.

She hears it, and she struggles, through the shivering shadows, to pull herself together; to make a flame out of smoke, a body out of dust.

He touches her, long fingers curling around her arm, and her flesh comes alive.

She’s hauled up and then let to drop.

Still in the subterranean lair, on the island with the stone basin. They’re not alone. A row of pallid faces, a blur. She knows them all, loves them all.

But an awful tingling ripple passes unpleasantly under her skin, threatening to pull her apart, and she does what she has to do to keep the curse at bay: she immediately touches his bare foot.

He smiles down at her, seeming to enjoy the sight of her on the ground, at his feet.

“Look at these fools,” he says. He gestures at his line-up of silenced, paralysed prisoners. “The Seven Souls. That’s what they call themselves. Did you know that? Of course not, how could you... _The Seven Souls…_ ” He repeats the name, spitting it out with such venom it sounds like he’s hissing in parseltongue even though he’s not.

He laughs angrily, humourlessly. “Can you imagine what they’ve been up to? I’m sure you can… My old enemy Dumbledore, passing on the torch to these witless children before he died… Oh, yes, these _seven souls_ sought to destroy the rest of my _seven_ horcruxes. He made sure to instruct them how. Well, _I_ made sure to capture them alive… I thought you might want to say goodbye first.”

He laughs again, this time all humour, no anger. After all, victory is his and its flavour seasons his murderous mood. “Aren’t I considerate?” he purrs with delicious relish, “Aren’t I a considerate master?”

She’s shaking her head. She’s been shaking her head since first she saw her friends. _Seven Souls._ No, she never knew.

“Say goodbye, Hera. If you can.” He smiles wide, and he trembles, so subtly she would never have noticed, but she is touching his foot, so she does. He’s trembling with pleasure and anticipation. His smile is fixed.

She tenses, flexes her fingers. Testing her corporality. She’s solid.

And then she springs up. She is struck down; he’s a monolith.

She gets up, and again is struck down, flung far from him. They are separated, and without the sensation of another’s skin on hers, she knows she will soon fall into unendurable darkness.

Determined not to let that happen, she runs instead to her friends.

He doesn’t let her reach them.

She doesn’t have much time.

Wordless, she begs. She’s really begging, and with sincerity for the first time. She asks for forgiveness, offers her apologies. Offers anything, really.

He can hear her if he wants to, and he does.

“There was a time when your pleas might have moved me,” he says. “But you’ve long squandered my capacity for compassion with your disrespect and recalcitrance.” His shakes his head in regret, but his cold, glittering eyes say otherwise, and Hera sees the lie for what it is: there was never going to be any compassion.

Her eyes flick to her loved ones and then back to him, and with her whole being, she rushes him. She doesn’t make it, not physically. But although her body is halted, her mind continues on.

Hera pushes desperately forward, pushing with animal instinct, and unintentionally, _impossibly_ , pushes right into his mind.

Immediately he is inundated by a rush of broken images, haphazard and un-curated, framed by grief and love:

A freckled boy in a train carriage surrounded by a pile of empty chocolate frog wrappers; a girl with a bushy head of hair, pale and petrified in a hospital bed; a family of laughing red-heads feasting in a garden under a lavender sky; a giant with a battered birthday cake.

Red and gold streamers and a lion roaring on a hat and silver patronus-animals flying in a room and Ron frowning at his chessboard and Hermione knitting socks… These and a hundred more press earnestly in on him, each melting into the other in heart-rending grief and love and terror.

Taken aback by the sudden and intense flood of all those memories and sentiments foreign to him, he falters as if he has been hit, and he blinks almost stupidly. His wand hand lowers a little. His eyes narrow and it looks like he’s trying very hard to process a concept that’s just out of his reach, but that with a little effort, might just _, just_ -


	5. Departure

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: This is a dark story, and this is probably the darkest chapter in it.

But his captives make use of his distraction and the resulting momentary weakness, and they break through his softening hold.

Neville breaks through the forced silence and roars “NOW!!” and Hermione manages some sort of flashing wandless spell, and Ginny makes for Hera, both arms outstretched, and several other Weasleys and a Hagrid surge forward and attempt to tackle the Dark Lord to the ground.

And that potentially momentous moment dies a tragic death.

He throws up physical and mental shields. His mind shuts to the inflow of Hera’s consciousness, and his wand moves, so swiftly it’s almost impossible to follow its movements. An explosive blast of power throws all back.

There is a great confusion, a great torrent of noise and movement.

Someone falls into the water and doesn’t re-emerge, and then suddenly everyone else is running from the stony shore, shrieking about bodies, and they all seem more afraid of the water than of the monster now executing the rest of them one by one in cold blood.

First to be cut down is Ginny, who has picked herself up and is racing again towards Hera. Backlit by a burst of garish green light, she falls forward, falling onto her face and not getting up. Her siblings scream. Her friends scream. Their shrill wails roll over the water. It’s no longer calm but churning as though a multitude of fish have surged up in wrath to thrash the surface with their tails.

And Hera, her voice also returned, shouts unheard through all this.

Voldemort storms about the little island with his wand. He is a storm of fury; a storm of death.

He screams also, wrathful and murderous. “Disgusting! Disgusting, beggarly tricks!” he screams. “How dare you!”

Desperate, Hera reaches for him as he passes close by her. He’s going for Luna and she must prevent him, but her spirit is beginning to slough off her body, the necromantic potion at its fell work, and she must touch him to save herself.

Her fingertips brush his robes. Her nerves prickle. But she is viciously knocked aside, and her head hits something hard and ungiving and then-

Hera wakes to the gentle sound of water meeting the shore.

Same day or same night. She’s come to, and only Ron and Hermione are left. Where the others are, she does not know.

He has her by the arm. “You!” He hisses at her, anger undiminished. “How dare you try to trick me!” He shakes her and then shoves her onto the ground, but she’s on him like a leech. She’s hanging on to his wrist.

Desperation makes strength.

“How dare you?” he seethes. He’s trying to shake her loose. “How dare you force your pathetic emotions on me! You think you can manipulate _me?!_ ”

“I never! I never!” Hera pleads wildly and ineffectually.

She’s telling the truth, and if he knows it, he’s choosing to ignore it.

“These ones were especially cherished by you, yes?” He gestures at her best friends. They’re clinging to each other by the shoreline. Hera wills them to jump in and swim, but they stand there and do nothing but hold each other.

Casting another spell, he forces them painfully apart; they squeal as if they’ve been burned. “These were your most valuable pawns?” he fairly spits.

“They’re not pawns. They’re my friends.”

No answer. Ghastly, uncomprehending face, curdling finally into something rotten. He’s considering the images that Hera unwittingly forced on him, and dwelling on that word: friends.

It riles him into greater and inexpressible feeling.

He expresses it the only way he knows how: His flicks his wand to cast the curse which is his signature curse, casting it in the manner of one casting a shield, like he’s only defending himself.

He’s not; he’s murdering.

Ron’s body falls into the lake, and she watches in special horror as it’s dragged down by pale hands. She knows now what’s in the water and where the rest of her friends have gone.

The shimmer of tears on Hermione’s face reflects what her own must look like. Everything is distorted; her vision is distorted. She’s looking at the world through that unique watery filter of grief.

“No!” she thinks she’s screaming: “No!”

Another jet of green, and Hermione is gone. And he looks relieved, almost.

“You’ve brought this upon yourself. You know that, right?” he sneers after she’s slid, boneless, to the ground. “Don’t cry about it. You chose to pit yourself against me. You lost. Now you reap the loser’s reward.”

He leaves. Hera looks towards the water. It still churns under his departing boat. Watery death.

Death.

Despite all of Hera’s past tribulations, death has never been an option, never even been considered.

“Death is not an option,” whispers the one part of her mind, the part that’s most primitive and most stubborn, the part that’s authoritative yet clinging, the part that fills all the cracks and crevices of her brain with its guiding principal: Survival!

And it whispers the whisper it’s always whispered: “Death will never, ever be an option, never ever-”

But it’s also the next great adventure, if Dumbledore is to be believed, and he’s always to be believed. More pressingly, this might be the only chance she’ll ever get to actually _go_ on that adventure, for who knows when he’ll move her again. Who knows when she’ll have the opportunity again.

 _Go._ What a word.

Hera’s going. There’s nothing left for her here. Nothing good, at least. She’s ready to move on.

She doesn’t even wait a minute after he’s gone. As soon as he disappears, she drags herself straight down to the shore. She breathes there on the edge for a moment before getting to her feet. Briefly, she wonders why she does, when it would be easy- _easier_ to just roll into the lake and let those bloated mottled hands waiting beneath its watery surface drag her in.

But-

_Straight-backed, and proud, the way your father died…_

She refuses to go to her death any other way, so she gets to her feet, straight-backed and proud. She’s going to join her friends again. Literally, quite literally. And they’re going to kill her, and she prefers that. She’d rather be taken by her loved ones, rather have the outline of their always-loved faces imprinted under her eyelids and the press of their always-loved fingers stamped on her skin. She’d rather have that than have the hateful red eyes and hateful green light, and-

Straight-backed and proud, Hera, the way your father died. You can do this.

Her toes skim the cold, then dip in. She goes farther. She’s up to her ankles, then to her calves, then to her knees. She keeps going. When she’s thigh-deep in water, _things_ brush her skin. She ignores her mind screaming for her to _“Stop! Go back!”_ and her voice ringing out around her in endless echoes:

_“No, no, no!”_

Another step. Shuddering gasp; final greedy gulp of life.

She gives herself to the icy blackness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you made it through this chapter, you should be fine to keep going. As usual, leave me a comment etc etc

**Author's Note:**

> Like it? Let me know by leaving a comment and there will be more.
> 
> Come talk to me on: https://curiouscat.me/itsjustsilver


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